Notts boss Paterson on data and management by committee

Martin Paterson is a head coach who does not understand data at a club where data analytics means everything.

Not that the new Notts County boss sees that as a problem.

"If you ask me about data, I wouldn't be able to give you an answer that makes sense because I don't deal with the data – I don't understand it," Paterson told BBC Sport.

"I am a person who works quite simply on the football side of things. I don't pretend to have skillsets that I don't."

By taking the job as head coach at Notts, Paterson made himself "one cog" in a new-look technical committee that will help influence how the Magpies operate at every level, from recruitment to team selection and tactics.

It is a committee that includes the club's owners, Chris and Alex Reedtz, its director of football Roberto Gagliardi, newly appointed director of performance Dr David Rhodes, as well as Paterson's coaching staff.

With the Reedtz brothers owning football analytics company Football Radar, the club is built on a data and statistics empire.

"I've worked at clubs, for instance at Barnsley, where they are completely data driven in terms of their recruitment, so the players turn up and they are the best players according to the data and we coached them," Paterson said.

"Here it's a more collaborative conversation between the head of football, myself and then the owners - we are all together making team decisions.

"You will find everybody uses data now days, we have some really big clubs in the Premier League that are solely data.

"I don't understand it [data] and how they can figure the best players within it, but what I do understand is that when players are brought to me, it is facts that they are telling me about the players – 'this player is good at this, he scores goals, he defends well' - and then we select the best out of the three that they give me."

Paterson's move to Meadow Lane sees him take the helm of a club for just the second time in his career, having been in charge of Burton Albion for the last four months of their 2023-24 campaign when they narrowly avoided relegation from League One.

He has spent a majority of his coaching career to date working under Michael Duff at Huddersfield Town, Swansea City and Barnsley.

It was in the United States that the former Burnley, Scunthorpe and Northern Ireland forward first moved into coaching, which included a spell on the backroom staff at Inter Miami under Phil Neville.

Nowhere, however, has he worked as part of a technical committee - a setup that Notts' powerbrokers sees as innovative, but comes across more like a relic of Victorian age football when clubs were managed by committee.

"I wouldn't put it that way," said Notts chairman Chris Reedtz with a smile when the historical comparison was put to him.

"I'm not sure how that committee in in the early 1900s worked but we are not changing the main decision-making responsibility. We are just creating what we hope will be a close and strong collaboration between these different key people within the club.

"We think it's natural you want to combine new ideas. If you are the director of performance you want to be able to provide your input to the head coach about the physical state of your players, it's a really important aspect when taking into account when deciding the team.

"It is a useful way of working together and we are not talking about about making decision in terms of votes or however committees used to make it work."

Reedtz insists that finding a new head coach to work with the technical committee did not complicate the search for Stuart Maynard's replacement, nor did it discourage more experienced bosses from showing interest.

Paterson said Notts' plans for the coaching set-up were made clear from the outset, and added that he relished the chance to be part of it.

"To ask people in football what's right is a really hard question to answer because the owners have a clear way they want to run the football club," he said.

"So the right way, generally, is what they say.

"I ultimately have to accept the things we talked about in the interview process, and that was them having a clear structure, a clear way of using data and debriefing the games.

"And I actually welcome it because what it does is pushes us as staff to be better. Collectively they think that it's a really good tool to help me win more games, so I welcome it."

And when asked if working with a technical committee risked him feeling as though his job was being interfered with, Paterson pointed out that listening to feedback and suggestions from club hierarchy was nothing unique.

"It's been ongoing in football for a long time," he said.

"Owners and chairmen generally do it verbally after games in the boardroom where they say 'what was that today, or why did you do this?'

"All it is, in a simple explanation from my side, is that they want substance to what I'm doing on matchday - why I'm picking a certain team, why I'm setting up a certain way and does that align with how they want Notts County to look? And I believe it will be."